Manipulating Schwassmann-Wachmann 1

Chase Ellis

Mentor: Yanga Fernández

Most of my summer has been dedicated in some way, shape, or
form to the odd comet P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1. SW-1
sets itself aside from your common comet with its large nearly
circular orbit (R ~ 6 AU, e ~ 0.004) and the high amount of
activity taking place at the nucleus. SW-1 has also been
known to experience large "outbursts" in a non-periodic
fashion, allowing the comet's brightness to increase
by 1–2 magnitudes within a week or so. During these times
of "outburst" lots
of structure (usually in the form of jets) can be seen in the
comet's coma, making it an ideal comet to study the nature
of these jets. The only problem is that we must find
these jets in the midst of SW-1's bright dust coma.

Eventually the jets found on SW-1 will be folded into a rotational
model for the comet, but for now we must find out where the
jets are and how they are changing as time goes on. In order
to find the jets we applied 6 different image manipulating
techniques, commonly used for studying coma, to our images
of SW-1. The use of all 6 techniques on each image is important
so that artifacts induced by the manipulations are not mistaken
for jets. Overall these image manipulations did a good job
of increasing the definition of SW-1's jets, allowing
us to pinpoint their location radially over time. At this time
in the project it is hard to say much result-wise about these
jets and SW-1's rotation. But all in all, two rotating
jets in "outburst" can continually be seen projected
from SW-1 in opposite directions throughout the summer 2002
data. Whether these two jets' "outbursts" or
orientations are in some way connected we still aren't
sure. With more time we will be able to model the rotation
of SW-1 with the help of the data extrapolated from this summer's
project.